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Overview

A miracle in war-torn Siena that begins with the persecution of a young nun in the turbulent days of the sixteenth century and culminates in the bitter German retreat from Italy; a drug-smuggling heist on an international flight where the knock are only one step ahead of the smugglers; a ruthless urban murder, where a brilliant QC decides to defend the killers, resulting in a startling act of justice; an incandescent art scam at a famous London auction house, and a brilliantly plotted revenge that shatters the elegant world of Old Masters - each story is a remarkable tour de force.

And above all here is a brilliant novella, 'Whispering Wind', which begins with the single survivor of Custer's Last Stand at the battle of Little Big Horn. It follows the defense from rape and murder of a Cheyenne girl and a flight across the mountains and forests of the West, ending in a savage present-day manhunt in the wild lands of Montana.

Whether his theme is international espionage, miraculous events in war-torn Italy or a Customs drug bust, the stories in The Veteran all share Forsyth's trademark for compulsive storytelling, his clinical eye for authentic detail and an unnerving sense of suspense.

Not since his New York Times bestselling story collection No Comebacks has he crafted such remarkable work.

Product Details

About the Author

Frederick Forsyth is the author of many bestselling novels, including The Day of the Jackal and The Dogs of War. He lives in Hertfordshire, England.

Table of Contents

The Veteran

9

The Art Of The Matter

87

The Miracle

157

The Citizen

191

Whispering Wind

227

Interviews

Q&A with Frederick Forsyth

Barnes & Noble.com: Before venturing into electronic publishing, you worked in a great variety of narrative forms: full-length novels, short stories (No Comebacks), novellas (The Shepherd), even book length non-fiction (The Biafra Story). Do you have a preference for any of these forms, or are you equally at home in all of them?

Frederick Forsyth: Basically I hope I am at home in all these media. Essentially I am a teller of stories. Each story has a natural telling length - not too sparse, not
too much padding. If you have a story in your mind that will simply not
sustain a full-length novel, you have to find another, shorter, format. I
believe the short story (about 30 to 100 pages of typescript) and the
novella (about 100-200 pages) to be much over-looked and disregarded art
forms. Some of the most riveting classics, by Kipling, O. Henry, Saki and
Mauham, have been in these forms. Because they are 'manageable' in a
one-exercise purchase-and-consumption form. I believe they may be revived by
the Internet.

B&N.com: You're best known, of course, as a writer of thrillers, but you've also produced the occasional change of pace, such as The Shepherd, a Christmas story, and The Phantom of Manhattan, a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera. How has your core audience responded to these changes in direction?

FF: Broadly speaking, yes. I have never really known who precisely buys and reads my work, but the sales figures of the non-thrillers bear up well, so I
think the occasional change of pace, style, theme and length cannot
disappoint the core audience too much, or it would show.

B&N.com: Although you've written many successful books, you're probably still best known for your debut novel, The Day of the Jackal, which has been perennially popular and enormously influential. Do you find it at all frustrating that so
many readers still associate you with this particular book?

FF: Not at all. Most writers are essentially known for one work more than any other. It may be the first, not necessarily. But certainly if people recall
that first, thirty-year-old book most of all, I am damned grateful. Better
than no one ever read a word I wrote!

B&N.com: Do you yourself think you've written better novels in the years since Jackal appeared? Do you have any particular favorites?

FF: My favourite is actually The Fist of God. It was, of all, the most factual, and the most revelatory. Written just after the Gulf War, I took a chance and gambled on revealing a host of details that I believed had been witheld from the public while the war was on. Later, most of these revelations were confirmed as true.

B&N.com: A number of your novels (Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Dogs of War, The Fourth Protocol) have been successfully filmed. Which of these films most accurately reflected your own original intentions?

FF: No doubt, Day of the Jackal. It was directed by that master film maker, Fred Zinnemann, he of High Noon and A Man for All Seasons. I thought he did a superb job on it.

B&N.com: Now that your initial e-book venture is behind you, do you have any plans for future novels or stories, either in electronic or traditional print
format?

FF: Not yet. I am a bit of a one-thing-at-a-time man. There are a number of vague ideas in my head, but I am not ready to tell them yet. First will come
the choice of subject and format, then the research, then the writing. Give
me a moment to draw breath!

Editorial Reviews

This collection of four short stories and a novella may disappoint readers expecting one of Forsyth's international thrillers but not anyone looking for a good read. What is surprising is the thematic and geographical range of these pieces, all narrated in a solid realist style with sharply observed detail and engrossing, sometimes surprising plots. Always suspenseful, the stories take us into disparate worlds. "The Veteran" features London thugs, the police, and the courts, whereas "The Art of the Matter," a highly entertaining tale of revenge, delves into the world of auction houses. "The Miracle," which takes us to an Italian hill town during World War II, is related as if by a medieval fabulist but with its own modern twist, while "The Citizen," perhaps the least successful story, portrays drug smuggling via an airline flight. Most startling of all is "Whispering Wind," Forsyth's tale of the Indian wars in 1876, in which we discover that a frontier scout survived the massacre at the Little Bighorn. The scout's love for a Cheyenne woman, a magical tale that spans two different historical periods, makes for compulsive reading. Recommended for all collections of popular fiction. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/01.] Ronnie H. Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A short novel and four long stories, by veteran Forsyth (The Phantom of Manhattan, 1999, etc.). The title piece, a British-style police procedural, moves brilliantly and richly through in Edmonton, Canada, where detective sergeant Jack Burns leads an investigation into the mugging of an older man brutally kicked in the street who dies after long days in a coma. Burns's investigation turns up airtight evidence against two thugs, who are captured, held in custody for two or three weeks, but never brought to trial. A toweringly bright defense lawyer gets them off scot-free so that he can engineer a greater vengeance than the court's. But a crucial plot point about the nameless victim isn't made until after the murderers are freed. Did the lawyer pick up this essential piece of information from a police artist's sketch of the unidentified victim? Well, "Vengeance is mine," saith the Lord . . . maybe He told the lawyer. In "The Art of the Matter" (a cockney play on Graham Greene's 1948 novel, The Heart of the Matter), stone-broke East End actor Trumpington "Trumpy" Gore, a spear carrier in a hundred British films who's rarely had a line of more than three words, inherits a grimy 16th-century painting, has it appraised at an auction house, and gets cheated out of a million pounds. This leads to a revenge rip-off that calls for Woody Allen's Zelig inserting actor Bob Hoskins into a dozen famous British costumers. "The Miracle" tells of a WWII visitation by Santa Caterina della Misericordia to the square in Siena where she was crucified 400 years ago; she now helps save hundreds of grievously wounded Germans and Allies, none of whom die. (But there's a twist.) "The Citizen" turns on a drug buston a Boeing 747, "Whispering Wind" on the lone survivor of Custer's Last Stand. Big Pro shows his stuff. Boffo.

Kirkus Reviews

"Lucid, vivid and delightfully readable, Forsyth is a master word-spinner and a master of meticulous detail."-The Los Angeles Times

"Each of the stories in this volume is Forsyth in top form. The writing exceeds expectations, the stories are never less than compelling, and the suspense in each of them is nonstop. -Otto Penzler, a Penzler Pick for September 2001

"A smooth and satisfying read for anyone who likes his or her thrills in small packages." -Providence Journal

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

The Veteran is one of five novellas included in this book. Each one has an interesting twist. My favorite -- and the longest -- is titled Whispering Wind. It is the story of one of Lt. Col. George Custer's white scouts who survived the Little Bighorn battle. Although the main character is fictional, it is gives a thorough, factual history of the Campaign against the Sioux Indians in 1876. The entire book, however, is hard to put down once you're into any of the stories.

Library.HKUST on LibraryThing

5 months ago

A collection of five short stories with twisted and unexpected endings. Keep you in suspense until the last paragraph.

missmath144 on LibraryThing

5 months ago

5 stories -- Most of the storied started out and even continued pretty slowly and not overly interesting, but the endings were great surprises.

gmillar on LibraryThing

8 months ago

I liked these stories, especially the last one called "Whispering Wind". Having said that, it was the only one that had an ending that was foreseeable for me. The others surprised me and I really liked that.

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

Guest

More than 1 year ago

The title story is very good and is an excellent representation of Forsyth's mastery of the suspense novel. For this alone I would recommend buying the book. However, the book loses steam from there. The Art of The Matter is entertaining, but there are gaping holes in the plot.Why wouldn't Slade's private investigators learn anything about our co-conspiritors? The Miracle is readable, but forgetable. The Citizen doesn't make much sense, and Whispering Wind is a nice idea that just doesn't come off. Forsyth never demonstrates why, in the later sequence of the story, the female character would fall in love with the hero. The way he was behaving I think most women would run from him as quickly as possible.

Guest

More than 1 year ago

I tried to decide what rating to give this audio book. The stories were good but the reading of the first four were boring. You got the impression that Partick Macnee was bored with the book. Bruce Boxleitner must have enjoyed his story because his reading put you right in the story. Frederick Forsyth should have had Mr. Boxleitner read the whole tape and it would have been more interesting.

Guest

More than 1 year ago

One of the gratest collections of short stories ever read

Guest

More than 1 year ago

When you read a book like this (consisting, actually, of 5 mini-novels in one) you just hope that Frederick Forsyth will get around to writing one more 'proper' thriller novel. I mean, the title story, THE VETERAN, is a quite brilliant depiction of a canny lawyer who has to defend some evil low-lifes after a diabolical murder. Forsyth is not a lawyer, so compared, say, to Dexter Dias's protrayal of a far worse killer in POWER OF ATTORNEY, the legal details don't seem quite as convincing (Dias is a practising barrister in the UK and his book was Thriller of the Month when I was over there). But Forsyth's genius has always been to make you 'root' for his hero. And this we do. I would have loved for the story contained in the restricted pages of The Veteran story to have a novel to itself because then we could make a proper comparison between Forsyth's legal thriller and Dias's - POWER OF ATTORNEY is the best legal thriller I've read in years, and THE VETERAN comes very close, which is the highest praise possible.

Guest

More than 1 year ago

The first eBook I downloaded. What they do not tell you is that you can read this so-called BOOK in about 20-30 minutes. It is well written, but at approximately $1.00 per minute, not worth the price.

Guest

More than 1 year ago

Another masterful tale of suspense with a twist at the end, in the same spirit of 'No Comebacks.' What would you call the e-Quivalent of a page-turner? I will be anxiously looking forward to the next installment. The MS Reader downloads and installs easy enough but be sure to download the .lit file to the same directory. For anything longer, I'd prefer hard copy or maybe a printable format like .pdf

Guest

More than 1 year ago

Enjoyed Forsyth's racy writing. Not much of a plot, but then it is a quickie-read. Took me 3 odd hours. But made rivetting reading. Will read the others in the quintet. Only wish the story had more meat to it! -Madhu Vasudevan, Chicago

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